Kovacevic: This is Hextall's mess, but only Sullivan, players can mop it up

CRANBERRY, Pa. -- The Penguins' hourlong practice was done early Sunday afternoon at the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex, as was the post-practice stretch, when Mike Sullivan gathered the players at center ice to speak a few words. No more than a minute in length. And that, seemingly, was that.

Except that the captain wasn't done.

Sidney Crosby promptly stepped into that same pack before it'd dispersed and laid down the law ... for how everyone would then go about engaging in a fun breakaway competition. After which Evgeni Malkin would scorch a beauty past Tristan Jarry. After which Malkin would whoop it up all the way back to center red amid otherwise stone silence. After which Jason Zucker would win the whole thing, then get mobbed by one of the benches.

After which ...

Yeah, that's Sid and Kris Letang doing their own drill, while everyone else had either left or was packing up.

After which, once even the indefatigable Letang had tapped out, Sid spotted Sam Poulin on his knees by one of the nets, scooping pucks in a black vinyl bag. Rookie stuff.

After which Sid skated over, dropped to a knee himself, and helped the kid out.

And all this a little more than a dozen hours after Sid was by far these Penguins' top performer in falling short to the Kraken, 3-2, the previous night at PPG Paints Arena, for their staggering seventh loss in a row.

But sure, let's all point to the Core rather than the one directly responsible for this specific mess.

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"Just keep working," Letang would tell me afterward when I'd asked what's needed. "We have to believe in each other, stick together, and we'll come out of this. I think we already are."

We had a long talk. First one, really, since the pandemic prevented this sort of thing. And I missed them.

Different people shine in different settings, and Letang, for me, has always been this team's chief truth-teller when times are tough. He won't sugar-coat, he won't deflect and, to an equal extent, he also won't apologize when one isn't due. If the Penguins generally play well in a losing cause, he'll stand front and center in saying so, even if he knows how it'll come across to some in the public.

So one can only imagine my satisfaction in hearing him affirm the thought process I'd held myself over much of the past week, and that's this: The past three games have seen this team's very best hockey of the still-young 2022-23 season.

For real.

Yeah, I know, I know, they blew a three-goal lead to Boston, a two-goal lead in Buffalo, then another in a second loss to second-year Seattle in a week's span. The outcomes stink. And within those outcomes, some of the sequences stink. And within those sequences, some of the players consistently stink.

But before I'd even had the chance to broach with Letang my theory that the Penguins' 4-0-1 start, one that had so many so stoked, was manufactured mostly against lower-caliber opponents and/or looser-than-usual versions of opponents and/or backup goaltenders, he'd affirmed that for me, too. Not in any insulting way, of course, but again, just truth-telling.

And now?

"We're playing way better now than we did then," he'd say. "But things just aren't going our way. Look at some of the plays that've beaten us."

I have. The Kraken's final two goals Saturday caromed off an ankle and a shin, while Kasperi Kapanen stood at the beach and somehow missed the ocean:

It's more than perception, though: I did some statistical digging, and the Penguins accounted for 64% of all of the high-danger scoring chances over these past three games -- 48 to 27 -- for the NHL's third-highest such figure in that span. It's an insane anomaly that all that meaningful possession's resulted in only a single point in the standings, meaning from the OT loss to the Bruins.

Mike Sullivan wouldn't bring something like this up without being asked, of course. He's visibly wearing this streak. As he'd say after this practice, "It's tough right now. It is."

At the same time, when I asked Sullivan if these past three games have, beneath the surface, brought some of the Penguins' best hockey, this was the reply:

"Oh, I think so," he came right back. "If you look at -- when we look at -- some of the analytics that we track internally, there's been a lot to suggest that we're leaning toward winning hockey games. We've been right there from an expected-goals standpoint. There's just such a fine line between winning and losing, right? It just boils down to a big play at a key time, a big save at a key time. A won faceoff. A blocked shot. There are so many little things that are hard to quantify, to be honest with you. When a team is winning games, you get that. But we've got to work for that."

Good for him. Because that can't be easy to acknowledge under the circumstance.

And good for him for sharing that sentiment with his players, urging them to "celebrate the little things," as Jarry described it. That and recent fun that's been had at practice makes for the optimal approach. No team's ever emerged from a protracted slump by pouting.

They'll get out of this. It might be Wednesday night in Washington, or it might be in one of the next two in Toronto and Montreal. But they'll end the streak soon. And when they do, it says here, they'll be a better hockey team for having gotten better over a really bad stretch.

"We had new players coming into this season, and that takes time," was how Letang worded it. "There was going to be an adjustment no matter what. It just stings that it's been like this."

It didn't have to be.

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Want to talk more about the Core? Or the lazy, inaccurate narrative that the star players getting older is the chief problem?

Cool, because Sid and Geno are both point-a-game players again, with Sid at 14 points, Geno at 12. Jake Guentzel's got six goals in just eight games. Rickard Rakell's got five goals, Bryan Rust four, and Jason Zucker's got eight points in 10 games to round out the top two lines.

They're getting goals from the people paid to score goals.

Letang's case is more complicated, as often occurs with him. He hasn't been at his best at either end, at least not since the first couple games, and his seven points are pretty much negated by his minus-7 rating. But -- and believe me, not a syllable of the following sentiment could ever come from him -- he's been weighed down by the clumsiest version of Brian Dumoulin any of us has ever seen. And there's no way of knowing, with any defensive pair, to what degree one impacts the other.

Dumoulin's a problem.

Kapanen's a problem, with one goal and 15 shots to show for 12 games.

Jeff Carter's a problem, with his career trajectory having plunged over the final two months of last season and continuing now.

The cap's a massive problem, with the space at a virtual zero once Teddy Blueger returns from Long-Term Injured Reserve this week 

And the common denominator for all this?

Right: Ron Hextall.

I suppose one could roll Brian Burke into this, as well, but Burke's the one who's always insisted Hextall alone is the GM, so I'll go by that. 

Let's rewind on Hextall's summer:

• First up and rightly so, he showed both patience and diligence in getting Malkin, Letang, Rust and Rakell to stay here at reasonable, arguably below-market-value rates. Same goes for Danton Heinen, albeit in a different bracket. This was superlative work. No one among us, myself included, thought this possible.

• But then, as if stunned he'd have any money at all left over, he inexplicably re-signed Kapanen for two years and $6.4 million, when one year and a fraction of that cash would be all that any of the NHL's other 31 GMs would ever consider, presuming they'd want him eating a roster spot at all. It was a stupid contract under any context, let alone one that'd prevent management from making any roster moves once the season would begin.

• And yeah, that's the situation. If Valtteri Puustinen or some other youngster does great in Wilkes-Barre, he's got to wait for someone here to get hurt to be promoted. That's ... farcical. That's dereliction of duty. A GM handcuffing himself -- and in turn, his head coach, his captain and the entire team -- for the purpose of keeping Kapanen ... I don't even know what to say.

• I can confess here that I liked the Jeff Petry trade and I was at least open-minded to the Ty Smith trade. But Petry's bombed to date, Smith's still in the minors because of the cap mess, and John Marino's got people in Newark crowing about a Norris Trophy candidacy. All that, combined with Evan Rodrigues' terrific start after signing for bottom dollar with the Stanley Cup Avalanche -- he's currently centering the second line -- makes for way too many misfires on outside moves.

• All of management's verbal focus on making the Penguins harder to play against proved to be nothing more. Jan Rutta's a fine addition, but he literally stands alone in this category. As a result, between the blue line and the bottom-six forwards, the roster appears far softer than last season. Unless, of course, I'm missing the impact of Josh Archibald, Brock McGinn, Kapanen or Petry in that regard.

Let me be more blunt: If this mess were to worsen, it sure won't be Sullivan who pays the price. It'll be Hextall and/or Burke. 

The new owners at Fenway Sports Group can't make any clearer how fond they are of Sullivan, especially not after extending his contract all the way through 2026-27 over the summer. And they should: He's one of the best in the business and, to reiterate, he'll find a way through this.

But how to hide from having crafted a roster that's so stuck in cement that the GM can't make a move even if he wants to?

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The time to let Kapanen walk is gone. The time to try to trade Dumoulin -- rather than Marcus Pettersson, the player Hextall did try to trade and now has to be ecstatic he didn't -- is way gone. And the time to sign an aging Carter to a two-year extension was ... never.

Nothing can be done about those now.

But that hardly absolves everyone at ice level, so please don't misinterpret that as my own aim here. 

No one's forcing Sullivan to play Kapanen or Dumoulin, much less to have Dumoulin dragging down his No. 1 defenseman on the top pairing. Both of those are squarely on the head coach, and they've got to be addressed before Washington.

No one's urging Sullivan to limit Rakell's ice time for reasons that I can't comprehend:

No one's implemented a rule that Casey DeSmith needs to start one of every three games when he's still looking so skittish.

The players can be way better individually, as well. Including the Core.

"These guys are certainly not happy about where we're at," Sullivan would say of Sid, Geno and Letang. "None of us are. It's our job to make sure we try to lead the way out of it. That's what they're trying to do. And that's what I'm trying to do as the coach. My belief in this group is unwavering. And I know that we have what it takes to right the ship here, so to speak."

They could've had more.